No-Pain Automated Hreflang Management for Your Global SEO

People search for your business from different countries. And in many cases, you want a specific version
of
your page shown for this or that location in search results.

The good news is: hreflangs let you tell search engines which versions of your pages suit this or that
language and location. The bad news — hreflang tends to be one of the most complex technical issues!

Now WebSite Auditor gives you all the tools you need for going international:

1

Automate your hreflang audit

With the new hreflang management feature in WebSite Auditor, rule out any possibility of an
error & forget about manual checks forever. How? Download the freshest
version of WebSite Auditor or let the tool auto-update. After that, create or rebuild a
project and:

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1. Go to Site Structure > Site Audit and analyze the Localization section. If your pages do not have any hreflang
implementations, the whole section will be error-free by default.

2. If you have implemented hreflangs, you can view all unique
hreflang values in Language versions and all unique resources
with hreflang tags in Pages with hreflang elements.

3. In case you have any errors with hreflang implementation, the tool
will flag such issues with Warning or Error. Click on Error, Warning, or Info
button to filter by these factors:

Missing return URLs — one of the most common and grave
errors. The tool checks for each language version of a page to point to the page itself as
well as to other language/region versions of a page. Plus, it is also required that all
language/region versions should point to each other in their hreflang attributes.

Conflicting hreflang elements — checks for a page language
variant to have only one hreflang language attribute assigned (e.g., a page cannot have both
"en" and "de" hreflang values).

Non-canonical pages with hreflang elements — checks for
pages that have both hreflang and canonical elements, which is very confusing for search
engines.

Missing "x-default" values — checks for pages with hreflang
elements but without "x-default" value. This value is not obligatory, but you can consider
using it to tell search engines what version to serve for languages and countries not
specified in your hreflang attributes.

Incomplete hreflang values — checks for pages to have not
only region/language-specific hreflang attributes but also a generic URL for users with the
same language and unspecified region. For example, you can have specific pages for
English-speaking users from Canada (en-ca) and the USA (en-us). In this case, you should
also specify a page for all English-speaking users from other countries.

2

Automate your hreflang generation

Hreflangs are usually specified either in an html head section or a sitemap. Updated WebSite
Auditor now manages both ways of hreflang building:

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1. Before you start generating hreflangs, you have to choose the best
fitting implementation method. WebSite Auditor allows you to build hreflangs both in sitemaps
and html code (the Localization tool):

HTML tagging — best for sites with a small number of
languages/countries versions.

XML sitemap — best for sites with many languages/countries
versions. Specifying the code for all such versions in HTML leads extra lines of code and
increases the page's loading time. Plus, it's much easier to edit hreflangs in the sitemap
than edit all the pages.

2. For building hreflang tags in html, go to Pages, click the Website
Tools button, and select Localization.

In the new window, click the Add localization button. You
will see a new tab where you can enter a page's URL, corresponding language, and country (if
applicable):

Make use of filters:

Edit existing hreflangs:

Save and export a TXT code chunk with hreflang tags for further convenient adding to your
pages:

3. Hreflang sitemaps are considered tricky to create. However, it's
no sweat with the hreflang sitemap tool in WebSite Auditor. Go to Pages,
click the Website Tools button, and select Sitemap. Once you're there, click Set Hreflang > Add localization. In the new window, enter
URL, language and country (if applicable).

Once you're done with building and editing, save the updated sitemap to your computer.

3

New reports to target customers with global businesses

All the audit data on hreflangs is also available in WebSite Auditor's reports. So give your
clients the full overview of their hreflang tagging efforts. Win new clients after showing them
all those issues you are able to tackle for their international SEO.

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The Localization audit data won't be added to your reports by
default. To see it, you need to create a new report.

In the Reports section, click the + button and choose the
template.

Edit the template by adding those sections you would like to see in it and then click Save. Now
your report is equipped with all the data on your localization status.

Join Our Webinar to Explore the New Hreflang Feature

Learn how to work with localized versions of your site in WebSite Auditor and have all your questions
answered during our live interactive webinar.